Famous United Airlines Gripe Sparks Startup Idea

Musician Dave Carroll made headlines in 2009 when he posted a YouTube video complaining about United Airlines. He has since started up a company called Gripevine.

By Sarah E. Needleman

Musician Dave Carroll made headlines in 2009 when he posted a video to YouTube complaining about how his guitar was broken during a United Airlines flight and the airline company’s poor response.

Now the man behind Time Magazine’s “2010 Top Ten Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” United Breaks Guitars, is working on a startup that aims to help connect disgruntled consumers with businesses so they can work out their differences.

Gripevine.com is a free website where consumers are invited to post complaints, or “gripes,” about shopping and customer-service experiences. For example, a consumer recently posted a gripe claiming that a national bus company failed to dispatch a bus to a scheduled stop or provide assistance in finding an alternative route. Users can also post compliments and reviews.

Once a gripe is posted, Gripevine notifies the business that the complaint targets. It uses proprietary search technology to identify an appropriate contact at the business, such as a senior manager with the ability to take action, as opposed to a front-line customer-service agent. “This is our secret sauce,” says Mr. Carroll, who co-founded the Web startup with entrepreneur Richard Hue of Toronto.

When notified, the senior manger is encouraged to claim a free company page on Gripevine. By doing so, he or she can access contact information for the person who planted the gripe in order to try and resolve the matter. Mr. Carroll says about 100 companies have so far claimed pages on Gripevine. Susan Stribling, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Co., confirmed that the Atlanta-based beverage giant took this step recently in response to two gripes posted on Gripevine. But she added that the company tends to see and react to customer issues mainly on its own website, coca-colacompany.com, and major social-media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Gripevine, which launched last year, has raised $2 million in seed money from angel investors.

The 15-employee startup is now gearing up to introduce its first paid features later this month: social-media-monitoring and complaint-management services. Starting at $9.99 a month, the services will help businesses avoid public-relations nightmares by identifying disgruntled customers before any serious flame-throwing takes place, says Mr. Carroll, 44 years old.

He knows firsthand what that means. Three and a half years ago, Mr. Carroll posted the first of three videos to YouTube alleging that United Airlines baggage workers mishandled his $3,500 guitar at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. When he arrived at his destination, the instrument was broken, and in the video Mr. Carroll claims that the airline refused to compensate him for the damage.

The clip, which shows Mr. Carroll singing about the incident while playing a new guitar, has been viewed more than 12.6 million times. That led to him being featured in a 2010 Time magazine article, and this year he wrote a book about the altercation that was published by Hay House Inc. (It’s called “United Break Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media.”)

The musician turned entrepreneur says the airline offered him $1,200 in flight vouchers and $1,200 in cash about five days after the video appeared on YouTube. But he says he asked the airline to instead give the money to another unsatisfied customer.

Charles Hobart, a spokesman for United Airlines, said via email “we regret that we did not provide the experience customers expect from us to Dave Carroll. His video made us more keenly aware that we needed to be more accessible to customers to resolve their issues quickly, and we have instituted a host of changes to enable us to do so. We have also taken steps, including being engaged on Twitter and Facebook, to ensure we are a part of the social networking conversation with our customers.”

Mr. Carroll isn’t alone in his pursuit to help consumers and businesses settle their differences. For example, TalkBin.com is a two-year-old service that lets customers send anonymous text messages to a store’s manager with complaints or compliments. Merchants can respond back immediately. The Mountain View, Calif., startup was acquired by Google Inc. last year.

In case you’re wondering, Gripevine has already gotten a taste of its own medicine. A user of the site recently posted a gripe about it. The complaint reads: “I was in the process of planting my 1st gripe and got all the way to the 2nd Step, only to see that the only choices for countries are Canada and the U.S. I put in all that work for nothing!”

Mr. Carroll, who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, says the site is working on expanding overseas.